Yellow marker at coordinates for Gobekli Tepe: 37.223237 N, 38.922546 E Gobekli Tepe in Turkish means “Potbelly Hill,” an archaeological site nine miles northeast of Sanliurfa not far from the Syrian border. The region’s water comes from the Euphrates, the longest river of Western Asia, that originates upstream from Keban, Elazig Province in eastern Turkey.

On Wednesday, June 13, 2012, as the sun rose I was standing on the Gobekli Tepe hilltop in southern Turkey not far from the Syrian northern border. Carbon dated to 12,000 years ago, Gobekli is older than Egypt, Sumeria, classical Greeks and Stonehenge. I had hoped, expected, that being there physically would help me understand the function of the mysterious 12,000-year-old rings of tall, T-shaped, oddly carved limestone pillars. But instead of understanding, I felt something alien, incomprehensible and disturbing.

Earthfiles Reporter and Editor Linda Moulton Howe at June 13, 2012, sunrise on the Gobekli Tepe hill excavation 8 miles northeast of Sanliurfa, Turkey. German archaeologist Klaus Schmidt began scraping away dirt from the hill in 1994. His dlysis – combined with ground-penetrating radar – have revealed nearly 300 thin, elegant, T-shaped limestone pillars were placed 12,000 years ago in circles covering 30 acres. Then a thousand years later, the entire mysterious site was covered back over with soil for unknown reasons until it was uncovered again in 1994 by Klaus Schmidt. Image by James Sorensen for Earthfiles.com.

Ramps have been built to walk around the archaeological excavations of mysterious 10 to 19-foot-tall, elegantly carved T-shaped limestone pillars placed carefully in circular patterns. Each pillar weighs 10 to 20 metric tons. Many are sculpted with odd, even unrecognizable, animals, insects and humanoid figures. The unusual limestone pillars were quarried from bedrock pits located around 100 meters (330 ft) from the Gobekli hilltop. Ground-penetrating radar has revealed nearly 300 thin, elegant, T-shaped limestone pillars were placed 12,000 years ago in circles covering 30 acres a thousand feet above the valley floor. Then a thousand years later, the entire mysterious site was covered back over with soil for unknown reasons until it was uncovered again in 1994 by Klaus Schmidt. Since then only 5% of the Gobekli Hill has been excavated. To his surprise, archaeologist Klaus Schmidt did not find evidence of cooking hearths, houses or trash pits, and no clay fertility figurines. He found some stone hammers and blades, but no specific tools that could explain how the extraordinary 3-dimensional sculptures were made.

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Another reporter who sensed the alien quality of Gobekli Tepe was Smithsonian magazine reporter Andrew Curry, during his visit to Gobekli Tepe in 2008. He wrote, “Predating Stonehenge by at least 6,000 years, Turkey’s stunning Gobekli Tepe upends the conventional view of the rise of civilization” far earlier than the academically acceptable timeline of Mesopotamia 5,000 years ago. “What was so important to these early people that they gathered to build (and bury) the stone rings? The gulf that separates us from Gobekli Tepe’s builders is almost unimaginable. Indeed, though I stood among the looming megaliths eager to take in their meaning, they didn’t speak to me. They were utterly foreign, placed there by people who saw the world in a way I will never comprehend. There are no sources to explain what the symbols might mean. Schmidt agrees, ‘We’re 6,000 years before the invention of writing here.’’’

[ Editor’s Note: Harran was a major ancient city in Upper Mesopotamia whose site is near the modern village of Altinbasak, Turkey, 24 miles (44 km) southeast of Sanliurfa and Gobekli Tepe. ]

In fact, Gobekli Tepe overlooks the Harran Plain, where the ancients there believed in the power of the north. It was for them the point of First Creation. It was the point in the heavens where the souls came from and returned to in death. The Mystery of the North was the great ritual they celebrated each year. To me, I wanted to try to understand what it was that interested them in the northern sky and I looked at the alignments just west of north and realized they seemed to be looking at a particular star. This was the brightest star Deneb in the constellation of Cygnus, the celestial swan or bird, which is also known as the Northern Cross.”

Photograph of the constellation Cygnus, the swan, or Northern Cross with star Deneb at the top on January 23, 2004. Deneb is the brightest star in the Cygnus constellation and one of the vertices of the Summer Triangle. A blue-white supergiant, Deneb is the 19th brightest star in the night sky in its apparent magnitude of 1.25; and at its absolute magnituminosity) has been difficult to calculate, so it is anywhere between 54,000 and 196,000 times as bright as our Sun. Image 2004 by Till Creder, AlltheSky.com, The Netherlands.

Andrew Collins: “And it was this bright star that the main central pillars in all of the Gobekli enclosures seemed to be focused toward. This was something that was the beginning of my interest in this constellation. If you start looking into civilizations, risen and fallen around the world – both in the Old World and the New World – it is at the core of religious beliefs, at creation myths, of funerary myths. It seemed to be the point in the sky that was the point of cosmic creation, but also the place of death. The place where the soul would return to in death. Why was this so important? For two reasons. Firstly, because this was the position on the Milky Way where the Milky Way splits into two, like forks into two (branches) to create what is known as the Dark Rift.